The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

bookcase that ran heavily to technothrillers, along with nonfiction along the lines of How You Can Profit from the Coming Ice Age. Above the desk hung a rural landscape which I was able to recognize as the work of Mrs. Nugent.
    There was a moment, I have to admit, when I was overtaken by a feeling of infinite sadness. This was an unutterably serene apartment, with its heavy draperies and its thick carpet topped here and there by oriental area rugs, its graceful French furniture and torchère lamps, its old-fashioned wall molding and ceiling medallions, and even the art on its walls, the hand-tinted steel engravings of faraway places that shared wall space with Mrs. Nugent’s oddly comforting thrift-shop acrylics. Why couldn’t I relish for an hour or so the joy of illegal entry; then, having done so to my heart’s content, why couldn’t I leave everything exactly as I found it?
    I suppose because photographic safaris are great for you and me, but they feel kind of lame to a born hunter. I could try telling myself to treat the Nugent apartment like a National Park, taking only snapshots, leaving only footprints, but it wasn’t going to work. I was a burglar, and no burglar worthy of the name counts the night a success when he comes home empty-handed.
    So I went to work. I started in the kitchen, where I unpacked the groceries I’d bought, wiped them free of fingerprints, and stowed them in the cupboards. (Maybe the Nugents would like Count Chocula.) Then I checked the refrigerator. It was empty of perishables, which suggested Joan and Harlan had gone off for a week or more. It was, alas, also empty of cash, as was the freezer compartment. A lot of people stash money in the fridge, and I guess it’s as good a place as any, or at least it was until everybody started doing it. No cold cash in the Nugent icebox, however, so I moved on.
    Nothing worth taking in the kitchen. There was an eight-piece canister set on the cupboard, white china with blue trim in a Dutch motif—windmills, tulips, a boy on ice skates, a girl with fat cheeks and one of those soup-bowl haircuts. One container held around thirty dollars in change and small bills, handy for tipping delivery boys, I suppose. I left it as I found it.
    There was a locked drawer in the desk in the den, so it was the one I opened first. Locks like that are never terribly serious, and this one was child’s play. Inside there was a diary, which I supposed was locked away so that Mrs. Nugent wouldn’t get her hands on it. I read a few pages, hoping for a little prurient interest, and it may have been there for the finding, but not on the pages I happened to hit. There all I ran into was Harlan Nugent’s personal ruminations on life and death, and as soon as I realized that’s what I was getting I put the little book down like a hot brick. Pillaging the man’s apartment was enough of an invasion of privacy for me. I couldn’t bring myself to ransack his soul.
    Besides the diary, the once-locked drawer held three manila envelopes a little larger than lettersize. The first one contained an insurance policy, the second a will. I did no more than look at each before returning it to its envelope, and I almost didn’t bother with the third envelope, which would have been a mistake. It was full of money.
    Hundred-dollar bills, and a thick sheaf of them. I took off my gloves to give the money a fast count, figuring it didn’t matter if I left fingerprints on the bills. They’d be coming home with me.
    Eighty-three of them, plus a stray fifty in the middle of the stack. $8,350 in perfectly anonymous used bills. A little off-the-books income old Harlan didn’t want to report? Or was there a perfectly legitimate explanation? It is, after all, still legal for Americans to possess actual money.
    Well, if it was unreported income, Nugent would bear its burden no longer. I pocketed the bills and returned the empty envelope to the drawer.
    Then, just to show off, I took out my picks